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We called it the monster because we could, though none of us found the label to be particularly satisfying. After a certain point, Yerim started calling it the Logos Pilgrim. Which was understandable, seeing as how she was the most mystically inclined among us, as well as the most compassionate towards things we didn’t understand. And there were many things we didn’t understand. For one, where did it come from? And why was it here?
Spotnik knows the humans haven’t forgotten him, because kibble still clatters into Spotnik’s bowl at six a.m. sharp. They’ve been gone long enough for all the vegetables in Hydroponics to shrivel up, limp and dead. Spotnik eats his kibble and licks up the crumbs, because he is a Good Boy, and Good Boys eat their rations. Even when the kibble goes soft and develops a white coat of mold and begins to stink so bad that he has to struggle to choke it down.
Once upon a time, there was a king who married a witch. Together, they had four sons and one daughter, and they were very happy as long as the king lived. When my father the king died and my oldest brother was crowned king, life went sideways for me, my sister, and our mother. The new king, our oldest brother, decided to use our sister as coin to buy our country’s safety. He planned to marry her to the king across a perilous border to our south.
WARNING: The reading of this Dispatch is prohibited for anyone but the intended recipient. There are no exceptions. If you possess the encryption key and are not the intended recipient, be apprised that the means of decoding the contents do not constitute license. Penalties for the possession of the following include life imprisonment, or immediate execution. If you are delivered this message by accident, either delete it or, if a hard copy, seal it within an opaque receptacle and store in a secure location.
The humans crawl into us, carrying their instruments and consulting their manuals. Their hands run over us, searching for nuts and bolts and hidden crevices. We are big toys that they all long to play with, to tear down and study. Our origin baffles them. They express endless awe at the complexity of our systems and are always asking themselves who built us. They come up with theories that get increasingly bizarre as time passes.
Night to day. In Diyu, the Earth Prison, Chun Wei opened her eyes. “Day” in the realm of the dead registered only as a less pervasive chill to the stagnant air. Not that Chun Wei needed to breathe any longer. She unfolded from the lotus position she’d rested in, stretching and rubbing her balled fists against her lower back until her spine creaked. The dilapidated Guanyin temple had an intact roof and a semi-intact stone statue, hacked out of rock by denizens still hoping for salvation.
They were not so much rumors as warnings. Beyond the mountain that overlooked the plateau was an ancient forest, enormous and wild. It was dark and treacherous and full of dangerous animals. The warnings were not about the danger of the beasts, but rather the ancient legend of a knight who entered the forest to pray at a desecrated shrine. Why he decided to pray to a devil or demon was long forgotten, but the response from the evil that lived there was still known to everyone.
Dekar Druid lives in an infinite library. Besides Ebizenum, who is in a special category of their own, he is the only living person in the library’s single tower. Outside, a forest surrounds the tower. There’s a lake a short walk to the north and a peak to the distant south. And nothing else. The lake is easy to get to, a respite on hot summer days, but Dekar Druid has never made it to the mountains, not even close, though he’s walked for miles southward.
When Clem first realizes she’s a monster, she’s in the gender-neutral bathroom on the fourth floor of the Seattle Convention Center, trying to convince the touchless faucet she exists. She waves her hands under the gleaming tap, then, remembering something Sabrina told her about sensors, spirit-fingers her way down to the base. Tries a little to the left of that, too. A little to the right. Still—and now she’s for sure late—nothing.
I learned from Bernadette that there are two ways a star can go supernova. The first is in a double star where one partner dies first, turning into a white dwarf, and the surviving partner swells in grief and dumps mass onto the compact star. But the atoms of compact stars can only hold up to a certain limit. The resulting explosion destroys both stars and nothing is left except a thin nebula, returning the atoms to space.
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